This document will guide you through the process of installing docker on
your VectorLinux installation and configuring the system to run docker
containers. Due to the fact that there is plenty of documentation on how to
use the docker platform all over the internet, I decided to save my
fingertips and not cover every aspect of ‘how to use docker’ here.

Before any docker containers can be launched, we need to make some
modifications to the host Operating System.

The following packages are needed for docker support.

docker

Search for the package(s) and install them via GSlapt or issue the
following command on a terminal:

slapt-get -u
slapt-get -i docker

Note

By default, docker is only available to the root user. If you want to make
it available to non-root users, add the user to the docker group via the
usermod command. usermod-a-Gdocker<your_user_login>

As of the time of this writing, the default cgroup configuration will
not work for supporting docker, so we need to make some changes to the
system. This should be very easy if you follow this procedure and run
the following commands on a terminal as root (or copy and paste
from here)

For cgroups, docker does not support mounting cgroups on the “all” single
hierarchy controller, but rather the indivirual controllers. That means
we need to create a new hierarchy to use for cgroup mounting because the
default VectorLinux does not have this setup by default in version 7.1.

One last thing to do is to modify the init system so that it respects the
instructions set forth in /etc/fstab. You will need to edit your
/etc/rc.d/rc.S file and apply this patch (save as text and apply using
patch-Np0<your_saved_text_file--verbose if you want)

After the docker daemon starts, it will create its own network bridge
(typically labeled docker0). You can verify this by issuing the
ifconfig command on a terminal. The output should display a
docker0 entry.

If both of these tests passed, then you are ready to use docker on your
VectorLinux installation.

Since there is plenty of documentation out there on how to use docker, I will
not waste my breath trying to cover that aspect in depth. This will just
be a quick guide on how to download an image, create a container from it and
launch a shell inside it.

The docker image repository has lots and lots of images to choose from. For
this example, we will be using a slackware64-14.1 image hosted at the public
image repository. To see the complete listing issue dockersearch<term>
to search for any distro image that interests you.

docker pull vbatts/slackware

That will download the slackware image and copy it to your local filesystem
for docker to use.

As of this writing, VectorLinux does not yet have an official image on
the docker public image repository. A test image has been prepared and
uploaded to our public package repository for testing purposes. Keep in mind
this is barely getting implemented, so it is possible that the image will
change if required later. It is also possible that these images will be
available from the docker public image repository later too. To import
the testing VectorLinux image, open a terminal and issue the following
commands

Then, import the downloaded image into your docker images collection.
For this example we will assume you downloaded the 32-bit docker image
for VectorLinux 7.1. File name is VL-7.1-BB-FINAL_vlbb-docker.tar.xz